Fiona Parker, Martin Evans and Charles Hymas
The Southport attack would have been stopped if the killer’s parents had acted as “they morally ought to have done”, an official report has found.
The British public inquiry concluded that the attack in which three young girls were murdered by Axel Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time, “would not have occurred” if his parents had raised the alarm about his escalating violent behaviour.
The inquiry found that Alphonse Rudakubana and Laetitia Muzayire knew their son was hoarding knives, accessing violent content online and making poison in his room in the months and years leading up to the attack.
But their failure to report him left him free to kill Alice da Silva Aguiar, 9, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Bebe King, 6, and attempt to murder 10 others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on July 29, 2024.
Inquiry chairman Sir Adrian Fulford described the “complete abandonment of responsibility” by Rudakubana’s mother and father as “utterly unconscionable”.
In his report, published on Monday, he said his two “principal conclusions” were that Rudakubana’s parents were at fault in not reporting his worsening behaviour, and that state agencies – including those in health, education and policing – failed to manage the risk the teenager clearly represented, and misunderstood his autism.
‘Far too often, Rudakubana’s “case” was passed from one public sector agency to another in an inappropriate merry-go-round of referrals, assessments, case-closures and “hand-offs”.’
Sir Adrian Fulford
Fulford was especially critical of “the moral failure of [Rudakubana’s] parents to warn the authorities about [his] weapons and what I find was their fatalistic approach to the risks that Rudakubana posed of violence to others”.
He recommended that the Law Commission consider a new legal duty for all parents to report their children’s criminality to the authorities.
A spokesman said the commission would “urgently consider” the proposal, noting that it is “an area that merits careful consideration”.
The introduction of a new legal duty for parents, regarding their children’s behaviour, would mirror criminal action taken in the United States, where parents of children who carried out mass shootings have been prosecuted on at least three occasions for reckless conduct or involuntary manslaughter.
In Georgia, Colin Gray, 55, was found guilty of murder and child cruelty in March this year. Prosecutors argued he was “the one person who could have prevented” his son Colt, 14, from shooting dead two teachers and two pupils at Apalachee High School in Winder in September 2024.
British Security Minister Dan Jarvis suggested that Rudakubana’s parents could still face criminal sanctions, saying he agreed that they had shown a “moral failing” but that any further proceedings would be a matter for the police.
Merseyside Police previously considered charges against Rudakubana’s parents, but in June 2025 a spokesman said the evidence had not met the required threshold.
It is understood that Merseyside Police will now be reviewing Fulford’s report.
Chris Walker, a solicitor representing the three bereaved families, said that Rudakubana’s parents had “failed in their responsibility to society”.
“He had not left the house for two years except when armed or seeking to cause harm, yet they allowed him to leave on that day knowing he was likely carrying a weapon,” he said.
“We call for immediate action, clear accountability and real change – not simply reassurances that ‘lessons have been learned’.”
The teenager was wrongly rejected for the government’s anti-terror Prevent program because his obsession with violence was judged not to be ideological, but Fulford concluded that, had Rudakubana’s parents reported their “true level of knowledge” to the authorities before the attack, their son would have been arrested.
Singling out Alphonse Rudakubana, a taxi driver, for creating “significant obstructions to constructive engagement” with agencies involved, he said the couple were too willing to defend their son.
‘There are things I wish we had done differently’
Giving evidence at an earlier hearing, the killer’s mother, a laboratory worker, said: “There are many things that Alphonse and I wish we had done differently, anything that might have prevented the horrific event of July 29, 2024. [For] our failure, we are profoundly sorry.”
Both Rudakubana’s parents, who moved to the UK from Rwanda in 2002, gave evidence to the inquiry from remote locations.
In a statement to parliament, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said: “Responsibility rests with the perpetrator. There was also responsibility within the family. The perpetrator’s parents knew the risk he posed but did not co-operate with the authorities.”
She admitted that there was “also responsibility on the state and on all of us here to learn the lessons from failures wherever they occurred – and the lesson is that the failures happened everywhere”.
Fulford’s report, comprising two volumes totalling 763 pages, highlighted five areas of systematic failure, including a misunderstanding of autism, a lack of oversight of Rudakubana’s online activity, and an absence of any agency accepting responsibility for him.
The killer was formally diagnosed with autism in February 2021 but Fulford concluded that Prevent, the police and the NHS had failed to understand the threat posed by the disorder and used the condition to excuse his violence.
Fulford wrote: “Far too often, [Rudakubana’s] ‘case’ was passed from one public sector agency to another in an inappropriate merry-go-round of referrals, assessments, case-closures and ‘hand-offs’.”
He added that various agencies had a fundamental misunderstanding of autism and how it affected Rudakubana’s behaviour. Fulford said that they “regularly used his autism as an explanation or even excuse for his conduct, including his violence”.
The inquiry chairman added that autism spectrum disorder, even before its formal diagnosis, had been “a way for agencies such as the police, Prevent and social services to view any difficult behaviour by [Rudakubana] as a ‘mental health’ problem”.
Mahmood told MPs: “None of the agencies involved had a full understanding of the risk that the perpetrator posed, and many did not take steps to assess the risk that he posed to others.
“There was a failure by the agencies involved to take responsibility, and nobody was clear as to who was in charge. So the failure because it belonged to everyone, belonged to no one, where individuals missed opportunities to intervene.”
Government to tackle extreme content
The home secretary said the government would respond to the recommendations by the summer. She also announced that they would legislate to prevent the spread of extreme violent content online, which Rudakubana watched extensively.
She said a new offence to cover lone individuals planning non-terrorist mass killings would also be introduced, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, as recommended by Jonathan Hall, the independent adviser on terrorism.
Rudakubana was jailed for 52 years in January 2025 for the three murders. He avoided a whole life sentence because he was nine days too young.
Mahmood said the second part of the Southport inquiry would directly address the rising numbers of “young men who are fascinated by extreme violence, boys whose minds are warped by time spent in isolation online”.
She added: “This is a risk to us all. Where someone is vulnerable to terrorism, they can and should be managed through the Prevent program. However, where they are not, there is no clear approach to that risk.”
Telegraph, London
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
.png?width=1200&auto=webp&trim=0%2C93%2C0%2C107&w=390&resize=390,220&ssl=1 "What the Strait of Hormuz looked like before Iran war and after US blockade")